At 31, two-time USATF 5000-meter champion Lauren Fleshman admits in her blog, "at some time in the next four years I want to have a kid," which she understands to be a not uncommon concern in her elite athletic peer group. In this post-Olympic period, "any woman over 26 that you’ve seen running on TV is probably thinking [motherhood] over" while "trying to think of a scenario that is not career-destroying."

Fleshman was a 2011 IAAF World Championships 5000-meter finalist but missed the London Olympics while she struggled with IT band issues and other problems. Now, looking at the next four-year cycle, she and other elite women aspiring to become parents face a couple of choices, she writes. If one of them successfully gets pregnant soon, she’ll "miss a World Championships, which has big financial ramifications, but get the next three years to build back." Or they can try it in an "off year," without any major global championships. The next and only one of those before the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics is 2014.

But motherhood can have ramifications beyond the obvious racing inactivity. Fleshman points out that pregnant elite runners aren’t merely missing out on prize money; as many as 85 percent of them could have sponsorship contracts suspended because "she can’t do her job (race/represent the brand)." Further, because they’re independent contractors rather than employees of the companies that sponsor them, they almost never have company health insurance.

She also confronts what she calls the “fatness” issue, suggesting that with the pregnancy and its aftermath, "we’re talking 12-16 months of VLT (voluntary largeness time). A runner’s job is her body. Imagine if singers lost their voice when they were pregnant? Or painters went blind?" She adds, "Keep in mind for a pro athlete, ‘getting your body back’ means back to that almost impossible form it was in beforehand."

In a blog post both instructive and amusing, Fleshman lists the questions aspiring moms/elite runners tend to ask themselves, like whether they can train through pregnancy and "will I get mommy super powers like Kara Goucher?" As for her own prospective maternity, Fleshman realizes, "It’s either this year, next year, or after the [2016] Olympics. Along with everyone else, I’ll be thinking it over."